


The One Where The Dog Dies

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Cooking, Food, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Panic Attack, Rats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:20:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26064889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: Rufus Drumknott felt like if one more person asked him to do something he was going to cry.
Relationships: Lady Margolotta & Havelock Vetinari, Rufus Drumknott & Arachne (Discworld), Rufus Drumknott & Havelock Vetinari
Comments: 4
Kudos: 33





	The One Where The Dog Dies

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline reference - just prior to Monstrous Regiment

Rufus Drumknott felt like if one more person asked him to do something he was going to cry. Under normal circumstances he would have accompanied Vetinari to Überwald, but the negotiations with the dwarves on underground and river transportations through the mountains was taking so much time that the everyday plate-spinning of Ankh-Morpork would fall through the cracks and shatter if there wasn’t someone on the ground running around keeping everything in the air.

And he was quite certain Wuffles, the wire hair terrier, did not have equine lymphoma. The amount of cytotoxic drugs Doughnut Jimmy wanted to pump into the dog, well...

It took two weeks to travel between Bonk and Ankh-Morpork. Wuffles probably wouldn’t last until Vetinari got back.

Rufus imagined him over there, receiving the news, knowing he wasn’t able to be there for his best friend.

He also knew, while Vetinari appreciated verbosity and almost always* wished people would say more rather than less, there was a tight limit to how much he could spent on clacks messages. So he wrote:

DOG DYING PRGNSS 2W STOP PLN INTERROBANG 

LANCRE

RD

Love And Nearness, Care, Regard, Endearment was the translation that did not depend upon misspelling ‘knickers.’ 

KEY IN CABINET 

HV 

Was the reply returned.

He didn’t want to do this. Rufus wondered if he would feel less awful about it if he actually loved dogs. Perhaps then he could see it as giving comfort to the animal, ending its pain. Instead of feeling like he was murdering the creature Vetinari loved most. That left fur on the furniture and peed on the floor and smelled worse than most corpses.

Agonizingly slowly the dog rolled over and looked at him. Evidently hungry for the first time in days. Its eyes were milky blue and nearly blind.

Then all Drumknott could hear was his own heartbeat. He knew he was he was hyperventilating because his limbs felt fizzy with over-oxygenated blood. His eyelids fluttered, replacing the sunlit room with a purple counter-image. 

Can’t stay standing up. Need to get to the ground. Focus. Okay.

Once sitting on the ground, back again the solid wood of the desk, Rufus pressed a hand to his chest and the other over his eyes. 

He didn’t have to do this alone. He should go downstairs and explain the situation. Other people have done this before.

-

Walking back from the Clacks tower, Vetinari seemed decidedly listless. There is a profound difference between Not Smiling and not smiling, and this worried spies throughout the town.

It was nearly a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point that when the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork was unhappy, anyone near him would also end up unhappy. 

When Igor let him in to Margolotta’s castle, he was unhappy because he’d been hoping having Vetinari around might lift the mood in the castle and that was clearly not going to happen.

When Ms Healstether saw him heading toward Margolotta’s office, she was unhappy because she knew Margolotta wasn’t going to answer any of the questions she had asked earlier that afternoon. 

When Lady Margolotta was confronted with the silent appearance of a tall, gloomy figure who had been in high spirits only an hour earlier, she was unhappy because she wasn’t sure how to comfort Lord Vetinari. Despite knowing the man since late adolescence she felt that ‘comfort’ and ‘Vetinari’ did not belong in the same sentence.

“Vut happened?” she asked.

Vetinari didn’t look at her. He was looking at her rat. Olga was a brown rat, nearly two feet long from nose to tail and had a pink ribbon tied around her neck. 

He put his hand on the desk so Olga could climb up his arm. “Do you remember Wuffles, Olga?” he asked. Rats lived maybe a quarter as long as dogs. The must perceive time so much faster, mustn’t they? To make three years a lifetime. Wuffles had still been able to keep up on walks the last time he had been in Überwald. 

Olga squeaked something. 

“I believe she just called your dog a term meaningk ‘out-of-touch, on ze far side of a generation gap.’” 

“Yeah, I got that.” The rat had settled in the crook of Vetinari’s elbow and was putting her paws on his stomach. “He’s dying, Olga. I didn’t know it would be the last time when I said goodbye.”

Olga squeaked again. 

“Is she allowed cheese?” 

“Yes, but I haven’t got any.” Margolotta was grateful to the rat for stepping in when she didn’t know what to do. “Come vith me to the market.” 

Olga now seemed determined to fall asleep, despite the fact that Vetinari’s arm was an inadequate shelf for her round, furry body.

“I think I’ll just stay here, if it’s all the same to you.”

-

“Has anyone had to put down a dog before?” Drumknott asked the busy office in the depths of the palace.

Arachne, who had had her transfer to the embassy in Fourecks delayed by Ankh-Morpork’s involvement in Borogravia raised her hand. “I have.”

“You’re not going to—“

“I’m not going to use a spider, no, death by spider bite is quite painful.”

Drumknott nodded.

“His Lordship’s not going to...” Arachne trailed off, “We should do something for him. For lots of people losing a pet is actually more traumatic than losing a family member.”

Drumknott tried to wrap his head around this idea and failed. Obviously Vetinari loved the dog to distraction, but he must have expected him to die years ago.

“You shouldn’t have been put in this position,” Arachne said decisively.

“He didn’t know—“

“I’m not talking about Lord Vetinari, I’m talking about the gods.”

“Why should the gods care? We’re two people. We’re not any more important than anyone else.”

“You don’t feel like the subject of the petty cruelties of—“

“No,” Drumknott said with finality, “I don’t. You’re going to help me find where he keeps the dog biscuits.”

-

No one in Margolotta’s castle both enjoyed cooking and was good at it, but she was making a valiant effort. 

Vetinari’s taste ran to pickled things, preserved seafood and fresh baked bread. 

Asked what he wanted he had rather hopefully suggested “Eels?”

“That lookth terrible,” Igor said, and turning around she realized he was talking about the bread.

“Do you think it’s salvageable?” she asked.

“In my thientific opinion, no.”

“You know that you can _buy_ eels in aspic and smoked eels?” Miss Healstether wanted to know. 

“That’s not the point.”

“What ith the point?” Igor wondered.

“Taking care of my friend.” Margolotta said the word friend—Freund—like it was fragile, like she was forcing it into its platonic sense.

Vetinari was taking a nap in the room where he was staying, Olga climbing over him, under strict orders not to chew the sheets.

-

Arachne and Drumknott found the dog biscuits and the key to cabinet where the poison was locked.

“Which one are we supposed to—“

Arachne pointed.

Instinctively, Rufus reached for her hand and she let him take it.

“I don’t want to look,” he said, feeling ashamed.

“I’m going to use a syringe,” Arachne said calmly. “You give him the biscuits and hold him.”

“I think I’m changing my mind about what you said about gods,” Rufus said, giving Wuffles some of each of the kinds of biscuit except the yellow ones.

“You know on some worlds,” Arachne said, pouring poison into the syringe, “‘antitheist’ means being opposed to the belief in gods, not believing in opposing the gods.”

It occurred to Drumknott that it would be very easy for Arachne to kill him right now, but that was no great cause for alarm, he spent most of his time in the company of people who could kill him very easily. “You mean on other planets?”

“You must have heard of L-Space? That’s how I’m getting to Fourecks.”

Suddenly something clicked into place. Something Drumknott hadn’t thought of because he didn’t like to think about magic.

“Hold that thought. Hold the poison. Step away from the dog.”

The Palace had a library. It wasn’t very big, but it definitely counted. Lady Margolotta had a library, it was almost ludicrously extensive, you could almost stumble into it through L-Space on accident.

It was a short walk to Unseen University and an even shorter run. In a matter of minutes, Drumknott was explaining his plan to the Librarian. The Orangutan seemed skeptical, admonishing that this was a special circumstance and he was not to ask for such a favor again, but agreed to show him through to Margolotta’s library.

There was no one in the library when he emerged from L-Space. He crept through the narrow corridors of the castle until he heard a familiar sound. Chronic sleep deprivation meant Vetinari often snored.

He reconsidered his decision in that moment. Wuffles knew that the human he thought of as his God loved him and maybe Vetinari would have an easier time with his grief if he wasn’t there in the moment. So he turned around and had the Librarian guide him to the Palace library.

Arachne seemed unsurprised that Drumknott returned without Vetinari. 

“Was he asleep?”

“How did you know?”

“My mum did that when we lost our sheepdog.”

Drumknott took the dog onto his lap. He seemed comfortable, trusting. He wondered if Wuffles could somehow see his still-living God in an afterlife Vetinari didn’t believe in. Rufus realized he probably smelled like Vetinari, insofar as Wuffles was still able to smell anything. 

Arachne depressed the syringe and Rufus thought of places on the grounds to bury the dog. 

-

Vetinari was appreciative of Margolotta’s efforts, although he did say “I didn’t expect you to do it yourself,” it was in a complementary tone of voice.

At one point in the evening she pressed cool fingers to his temples and he asked if she “was going to do telepathy?” She moved her fingers in steady circles and he sighed at the release of tension and she asked “did you really think I would use telepathy without asking?”

Vetinari didn’t think anyone would ever voluntarily use telepathy on him. They’d be afraid of ending up in a chilly clockwork wasteland. A chilly clockwork wasteland whose owner was sitting outside reading frostbite remedies. 

The weeks spent travelling home—he didn’t necessarily think of the Palace as home, so much as the whole city, from the suburban sprawl that extended from Ankh, to the industrial yards and warehouses beyond the walls of the city, to the farmland that continued until it turned into Quirm—were the hardest. He leaned into the discomforts of travel, lest he lose sight of his fortifications against the great calamity of being alive. So often when things were at their worst Wuffles would climb on him or put his head on his feet or give him a Look. He couldn’t ask for any better grounding or source of perspective than the love of a dog.

So he clung to the physical pain of travelling by coach, clung to being able to say ‘when this is over it will be better.’

At the end of the journey he was greeted by a number of clerks trying not to show how concerned they were, which, in itself, was so touching as to nearly move him to tears. 

Drumknott and Arachne didn’t bother. Arachne, because she didn’t worry about people, and subscribed to Lord Downey’s notion that you shouldn’t start doing something if you knew you weren’t going to be able to stop and Drumknott because he knew there was no point in hiding anything from Vetinari. If you didn’t want him to see something your only hope was to ask him not to look. 

Arachne gave him lilies and dark chocolate in case it wasn’t totally obvious that she had been the one handling the poison. Vetinari wasn’t sure how to feel about this, since a dog-owner’s long ingrained instincts dictated that he was immediately to get rid of the lilies.

Drumknott asked, businesslike and serious, if it was okay for him to give him a hug. 

Vetinari held on longer than he expected, Drumknott’s head resting against his chest. Drumknott wished he could give Vetinari as long as he needed, but after about twenty seconds he felt stifled and trapped by the proximity to another person and pulled away.

“Sorry,” Drumknott said.

“No, don’t apologize. Thank you. Thank you for everything.”

*A notable exception being Moist von Lipwig, who could talk nearly anyone _into_ a paper bag


End file.
